The situation in Iraq is much worse than a civil war, said United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in a candid interview in his final few weeks on the job.

Calling the situation "extremely dangerous," Annan told the British Broadcasting Corporation that the international community must help the country to rebuild because he is uncertain Iraq can accomplish it on its own.

Kofi Annan's term as UN secretary general expires at the end of the month.
(CBC)
"Given the level of violence, the level of killing and bitterness and the way that forces are arranged against each other, a few years ago, when we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war; this is much worse," Annan said.

Annan was vehemently opposed to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, calling for more time to discuss a peaceful resolution to the standoff with then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Everyday life in Iraq is much worse under the American occupation, he said.

"If I were an average Iraqi, obviously I would make the same comparison," said Annan, whose term ends on Dec. 31.

"They had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets. Their kids could go to school and come back without a mother or father worrying 'Am I going to see my child again?' "

Iraq's government has not been able to bring security and control, said Annan.

"It's not working the way they had hoped and it is essential to take a critical look at what is going on and if necessary, change course."

Conflict threatens to spread

Annan warned that the conflict in Iraq is just one ingredient that threatens to spill into other parts of the world.

"People are worried. They are worried about the broader Middle East, they are worried about tension with Iran, with Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and some would even stretch it as far as to Afghanistan," he said.

"So we have a very worrisome situation in the broader Middle East and we also need to look at them as a whole, not as individual conflicts," he said.

"There are linkages between these crises."

Annan also called the three-year-old conflict in Sudan's Darfur region "deeply disappointing."

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and many more are being terrorized every day by atrocities committed by militias, some purportedly backed by government troops.

"It is tragic but we do not have the resources or the will to confront the situation," he said. "If you did it, would you make the situation worse or would it be better?"

Annan blamed the country's government, which has refused to let UN peacekeepers enter.

"They are refusing to let the international community come in and assist," said Annan. "They will be held individually and collectively, responsible for what is happening and what happens."

Annan offered some advice to his successor, South Korean Ban Ki-moon: "He should do it his way. I did it my way, my predecessors did it their way and he should do it his way."

Rumsfeld also listed increasing the number of U.S. forces embedded with Iraqi forces, beefing up security near the Iranian and Syrian borders, and providing money to key political and religious leaders "as Saddam Hussein did."

The memo also said more Iraqi troops could be placed with U.S. units, which would improve "our units' language capabilities."

"Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough," Rumsfeld wrote.

Bush agrees with Rumsfeld "that things are not proceeding well enough or fast enough in Iraq. We have to make some changes, we need a new way forward in Iraq, and that's what this policy review is all about," Bush adviser Stephen Hadley said.

"What Secretary Rumsfeld did, I think very helpfully, was put together a sort of laundry list of ideas," Hadley said on ABC's "This Week."

Bush said Saturday "I want to hear all advice before I make any decisions about adjustments to our strategy in Iraq. ... The decisions we make in Iraq will be felt across the broader Middle East."

In addition to an internal government review, Bush will look at recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker that will release its report on Wednesday.

The views of Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, and the Iraqi government's goals, will also be factors as Bush makes decisions over the coming weeks.

Rumsfeld announced his resignation Nov. 8, a day after Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. Bush's choice to replace him, former CIA director Robert Gates, has his confirmation hearing Tuesday in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Negative views of the "war on terror" were strongest in Baghdad (98%) and Rio (92%).

Asked if they "would consider taking action that could result in innocent people dying if they felt very strongly about a cause", 17% said they would. The figure was highest in Baghdad (34%), followed by Jakarta (31%) and London (25%).

Religion figured strongly in the teenagers' lives, with 86% saying they believed in God or a higher being. Although 66% thought religion a force for good, a significant proportion - 20% - viewed it as a source of conflict. In Baghdad, 64% considered it so.

Just over a third (34%) said they were prepared to marry someone from a different religion. That figure was highest in Nairobi (52%) and New York (50%), and lowest in Baghdad (4%).

The teenagers also took a favourable view of immigration, with 79% saying people should be able to live in whichever country they choose. Sixty-four percent said they would emigrate to secure a better future and 14% said they would risk their life to do so.

Oddly, the largest numbers of those who had no intention of emigrating were found in the troubled city of Baghdad (50%).

Opinion was divided as to whether those who move to a new country should keep apart to maintain their own beliefs and culture (38%), or integrate and adopt the culture of their new country (49%).

Only 51% of respondents said they had heard of climate change and understood what it was, and among those only 34% have changed their behaviour as a result. A majority (52%) said they would not lower their standard of living to reduce the effects of climate change.

The vast majority (85% overall) thought crime was generally increasing in their country, but only 6% said they would consider stealing if they really wanted something and could not afford it. Sixteen percent said they would commit a crime in order to become an instant millionaire if they knew they could get away with it - a figure which rose to 37% in Nairobi and 31% in London.

Overall, 17% said they would consider cheating to get into university.

The poll, for the BBC World Service, was conducted by research agency Synovate in October, with 300 or more interviews in each city. Questions about religion and terrorism were not permitted in Egypt because of government restrictions.

In fact, most police units had less than 50 percent of their authorized equipment on hand as of June, says the report, which was issued two weeks ago but is only now circulating among members of relevant committees in the U.S. Congress.

The report also found that no effective field training program had been established in Afghanistan, despite years of warning from police training experts that field training was the backbone of successful training.

Police training experts who have studied or have firsthand experience with the American effort in Afghanistan said they agreed with the report's findings but said additional problems needed to be investigated, including the quality, cost and effectiveness of relying on private contractors to train police officers.

Those experts also questioned why the principal contractor in Afghanistan, the American company DynCorp International, escaped direct criticism in the report, which focused on U.S. government managers.

Considering the state of the program, it will need an estimated $600 million per year indefinitely to sustain the force, says the report, undertaken by the offices of the inspectors general at the Defense Department and at the State Department. Howard Krongard, is the inspector general at the State Department, which led the work on the report, and his counterpart at the Pentagon is Thomas Gimble.

American advisers will also have to combat endemic corruption and ineffectiveness in the Afghan Interior Ministry, the report says.

Efforts to make up for the shortfall of effective officers are already under way on some of the issues that the report identifies. Afghan and American officials recently announced that they had instituted an "auxiliary police" program at the end of the summer, which aims to hire 11,200 auxiliary police officers in parts of the country beset by Taliban attacks, primarily in the country's south.

But these officers receive only two of the standard eight weeks of training, and the police training experts say that program could worsen the situation. They say the new hastily created program could place ill-trained and poorly vetted officers in the field and allow militias and criminals to infiltrate the force. An American official involved in the new effort said it became necessary after southern governors besieged by Taliban attacks began hiring police officers on their own this summer. American officials feared they were seeing the beginnings of de facto private militias.

"This was designed to avoid the creation of the militias," said the official, who was not authorized to comment publicly.

Experts on police training say the United States has made the same mistakes in training police forces in Afghanistan as it has in Iraq, including far too little field training, poorly tracking equipment and relying on private contractors for the actual training. At the same time, these experts say, the failure to create viable police forces in the two countries has played a pivotal role in undermining the American efforts to stabilize them.

In Afghanistan, the failure has contributed to the explosion in opium production, corruption at the Interior Ministry and the resurgence of the Taliban.

In Iraq, the challenge is even larger: sectarian death squads have infiltrated the police force and helped push the country to what many are now calling a civil war.

"In both places, we were extraordinarily late getting started," said Robert Perito, a policing expert at the United States Institute of Peace and former official with the National Security Council, the State Department and the Justice Department.

"In both places, you have a dysfunctional Interior Ministry in control, and in both places the United States has tried to stand up a ministry advisory group to bring order out of chaos."

In an interview this fall, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said the violence in the country's south was partly a result of the lack of a viable force. He called for "much more support" from the United States and for an expansion of the country's about 70,000-officer force.

Iraq is falling ever deeper into chaos and sectarian conflict. Outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls it 'worse than a civil war.' Lebanon is teetering on the brink of civil war. The agonies of Palestine - now the world's largest outdoor prison - continue without relent. Iran's power and influence are surging, scaring the daylights out of Washington's sunni clients in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf.

For the latter, thank George Bush. He overthrew two of Iran's bitterest enemies, Taliban and Saddam Hussein, then stuck US ground forces in the $250 million per day Iraq quagmire that is now estimated to cost at least $1 trillion before the United States admits defeat and pulls out.

As Iraq turns into a nightmare of carnage and hate, President Bush and mentor Dick Cheney rushed to Jordan and Saudi Arabia to urge their local allies to pull America's bacon out of the fire.

But Iraq's hapless 'prime minister,' Nuri al-Maliki, presides only over Baghdad's US-protected Green Zone. The US controls what pass for Iraq's police and armed forces. How can Bush expect a powerless figurehead to do what the mighty US cannot?

At least Malliki had the pluck to make a symbolic protest after humiliating reports leaked in Washington the US intended to dump him. So much for Iraq 'democracy.' Washington may be headed towards installing a ruthless Saddam clone, either the brutal CIA 'asset,' Iyad Allawi, or some iron-fisted general.

Iraq has no real government or army. What western reporters and Pentagon spinners term the Iraqi Army is really a collection of Shia militias, death squads and mercenaries, many former convicts. The US occupation's extensive use of Shia death squads to fight the Sunni resistance has played a key role in igniting Iraq's current sectarian bloodbath. This little-known story is a major scandal.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Jordan warn they may send troops into Iraq to protect its Sunni minority from ethnic cleansing by the Shia majority. Such a move could provoke the powerful Turkish Army to invade independence-seeking Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. Iran would be quickly drawn into the melee.

Iraq's neighbors deeply fear its chaos will spread across their borders, with dangerous, unpredictable consequences for all concerned, particularly Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The long-awaited Iraq Study Group's report comes out this week. It is expected to call for a phased withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq, and retention of some 'intervention units' in neighboring countries. France ruled its West African empire for a half a century this way: installing compliant puppet rulers kept in power by strategically located French Foreign Legion and Air Force units ready to swiftly intervene at signs of unrest.

The Iraq Study Group will also likely call for direct talks with 'axis of evil' members, Iran and Syria. Their cooperation is essential to stabilizing Iraq.

But a furious, behind- the- scenes battle is raging in Washington between advocates of diplomatic engagement with Damascus and Tehran, and the powerful Israel lobby, which has successfully blocked for decades all attempts to open such badly needed dialogue or press Israel over Palestinian rights. Israel, its American supporters, and so-called 'Christian Zionist' evangelicals are pushing hard for US attacks on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

In another welcome sign of the expanding purge of neocon extremists from the administration, the odious John Bolton just resigned as UN Ambassador, producing sighs of relief in the world organization. His main role there was to promote neocon causes, punish the UN for rebuking Israel, and sabotage UN collective undertakings. Bolton jumped before the new Democratic-controlled Congress made him walk the plank.

A second important neocon, senior Pentagon official Stephen Cambon, was also purged this week. He played a key role in producing faked intelligence over Iraq for his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and in engineering the war. The Pentagon brass is delighted by what they are gleefully terming 'ethnic cleansing' of the pro-war neocon ideologues from the Pentagon.

So far, so good. But if and when Washington announces 'phased withdrawals' of US forces from Iraq, the already shaky morale of American troops there will plummet. Who wants to risk life or limb for a phased withdrawal?

This is exactly what I saw happen to US forces in Vietnam after President Lyndon Johnson announced military victory was no longer his goal. No GI wanted to be the last soldier killed in a lost war started by bungling politicians. I organized a protest in officers' school over Johnson's 'no-win' policy that ended up getting 200 of us sent to 'death units.' (see my column on Gen. Ware in my 'Archives' for more on this interesting story).

Once Washington utters the dreaded 'w' word - withdrawal' - Iraqis working for the US occupation will decamp to the Sunni or Shia opposition. Iran's influence in Iraq will soar. America's Arab allies - nastily described as 'fat women' by a jihadist web site - will panic.

Actually, they are panicking already, and with good reason. America's defeat in Iraq by a bunch of rag-tag Sunni guerillas is going to electrify the Muslim World and jeopardize the continued rule of all the US-backed despots, generals and feudal monarchs who so badly misgovern the Mideast. Wherever he is, Osama bin Laden must be smiling broadly. His master plan is working right on schedule.

But President Bush keeps insisting 'no retreat.' He still seems unable to see the writing on the wall in Babylon.